Exposure !

Although the profile of SL is somewhat less than Premiership Football, the principle behind there being a sponsor is the same.
The sponsor's name is used every time the league gets a mention, which "improves" their profile and the organisation, in return, receives payment for the naming rights.............................but not in RL.
The sponsor got a regular mention and RL got diddly squat and in the process reduced its perceived value for future seasons.

How much more business did it get Stobart?
How many customers switched their logistics to Stobart as a result of Stobart's SL sponsorship?
If we can answer that we can answer how much the sponsorship deal was worth to Stobart.

how much was that actually worth to them in ££££ though? Lots of people might have heard of Stobart who hadn't previously known them, but how many of those people were convinced to change their road haulage provider to Stobart.....?

A better point to ponder is, how much is Stobart's commercial revenue stream worth (i.e. Stobartfest, t-shirts, models trucks) in terms of public value and perception, considering they have a prime time terrestial TV slot and RL doesn't.

The point is, that Stobart were rolled out as sponsors in a deal that was worth an alleged £2 million to the sport and in return Stobart's had a few of their vehicles (14 iirc) adorned with pictures of SL players and in return the had the naming rights for the sports premier competition.
Maybe this was good business by the RFL , as we have nothing this season but, the deal was cut short last season.
Although nobody will ever know the figures for how many more people now follow RL, compared to how many more people are aware of the Stobart brand but, I leave this for you to decide.
A stunning bit of business, followed by something even better ???
Surely, the sponsorship of SL should be at the top of the priority list, for our masters at Red Hall and yet we can't get a major sponsor on board.
People in the real world would lose their jobs if they couldn't achieve their main objective at work and be replaced by someone who could.

Something like that is notoriously hard to measure. It's not [iimpossible [/ito try to gather some data, but in any year there are 100s of reasons a firm's sales go up and down so specifically separating out the effect of brand exposure is very inexact indeed. (incidentally the difficulty of measuring the results of broad marketing is a reason Google Adwords is so popular and successful - it's measurable, and you pay for 'success'). Something like the Stobart deal would be hard to evaluate numerically, but there are expert analysts who can help by using huge amounts of historical data from other deals. However, in this case, I would guess that they didn't pay it much attention, for the reasons that a) it was unlikely to be *harmful* to the brand, so no worries there, and b) it cost virtually nowt! ( so why worry about it? )

The mere fact that it cost virtually nowt suggests that nobody at Stobart thought it was worth a great deal.

Indeed they would. Part of the skill of keeping your snout in the trough is making sure that your main objectives, if you bother to describe them at all, are so impossible to actually pin down that nobody can hold you to them. That way, you can put out a press release everytime you display a basic competence, which is enough to convince life's hopelessly bewildered, like Smokey, that all the other stuff - the stuff that you'd be expected to deliver in the real world - doesn't matter that much.

The new partnership with Brut for next season seems a good match tho